Did John Actually Have a Vision?/Genre

 This is one question I’ve had about Revelation. One reason is the oddness of the vision that at times seems difficult to conceptualize. There are numerous examples I could point to, but one that immediately comes to mind is the lamb picking up the scroll. This might seem a little nit-picky, but Lambs don’t have hands. I imagine an almost Veggie Tale-like depiction of the lamb, where the scroll almost floats by the hooves or attaches to it as if it were a magnet.

Maybe this is just me and the way my weird mind works, perhaps taking things too literally, but this is just one of many things in Revelation I find difficult to conceptualize as a vision.

Here is what Ian Paul’s commentary has to say. This is a rather long quote as I thought it was all important on this point:

“Most ordinary readers of Revelation assume that John had some sort of vision, and that what we have is a more or less straightforward description of what he saw as if he was describing a picture. But there are several reasons for qualifying this kind of understanding.

The first relates to the nature of visions and spiritual auditory experiences…[which tend to be difficult to be highly specific about]…The second reason is the recognition that there is an established form of literature known as 'vision report’, particularly in texts similar to Revelation among Jewish apocalypses, and there is considerable debate as to whether the authors or their audiences necessarily assumed that the text originated with an actual visionary experience…

But even more important evidence comes for the text itself. John quite often describes things that make no literal sense, or are inconsistent or incomplete, and these indicate that he is more concerned with the meaning of the words he uses—and there symbolic significance in the light of Old Testament texts he is drawing on and contemporary Greco-Roman symbolism—than in writing a report about meaningful things that he has seen. It is not actually possible for a rainbow to ‘have the appearance of an emerald’ (4:3, AT); English translations often try to make sense of this by rendering it as ‘shining like an emerald’, but this is not the language that John uses. In his vision of the throne room, it is often not clear how the location of each group (living creatures, angels, elders) fits with the location of others, and the description develops through the text as John adds further details which are quite prominent (such as the altar before the throne) such that it is off that he did not mention these previously if he was simply describing a scene. In his description of the New Jerusalem, he describes it as ‘like a jasper, clear as crystal’, when jasper is an opaque gem (21:11)…and John does not really make clear the relationship between the central street, the river of the water of life and the (single) tree of life which appears to manage to grow on both sides of the river (22:1-2).

On the other hand, John’s text is constructed with extraordinary attention to the details of the words he is using. John repeats key words with certain frequencies… He carefully repeats a phrase but with consistent variation, such as the fourfold ‘every tribe and language and people and nation’ repeated seven times but never twice in the same way…and similar repetition with variation in the seven mentions of the living creatures with the elders. And he reuses and reworks Old Testament texts and ideas from all over the canon of Scripture. These all point to a text that has been composed with extreme care over some time.

Perhaps the most telling feature is John’s own focus on his words, rather than on the visions themselves (1:3; 19:9; 21:5). In the final affirmation, the angel almost appears to step out of the scroll and address John’s audience directly, referring to all that John has written as ‘trustworthy and true’ (22:6). And at the end of the text, John finishes his letter with an ending in striking parallel to the ending of 1 Corinthians, where Paul takes the pen from his amanuensis to sign off the letter himself (1 Cor. 16:21-24). In the same way, John appears to ‘hand his pen’ to Jesus to allow him to sign himself off (in place of Paul’s ‘Come, Lord!’ we have the first person ‘I am coming soon’, 22:20). For John, it is clear that it is the words he has written, more than anything else, which constitute what he has been given by God as the ‘revelation of Jesus Christ’ (1:1, AT), and it is to the words—and not to any speculative reconstruction of what his vision might have looked like—that we must attend.

Did John have a vision (or series of visions)? If he did, he has reported it in a very careful way. We don’t have a vision; we have a vision report, a text, and we should attend to it. John’s aim is not to impress us with his visionary experience, nor (necessarily) to encourage us to have our own. Rather, John wants us to order our lives in the light of the truth about God that these vision reports reveal to us.” (Ian Paul, Revelation: An Introduction and Commentary, pg. 23-25)

So whether or not Revelation is a vision or series of visions is not nearly as important as the words of the prophecy. Whether this is a literary genre and not a vision, or a vision or series of visions made into a word of prophecy, the word of prophecy and the apocalyptic language is the most important part to pay attention to.

What Genre is Revelation?

“Genre tells us how to interpret what has been written.” (Ian Paul, Revelation: An Introduction and Commentary, pg. 23-25) The genre of Revelation is, of course, apocalyptic. The same genre as Daniel 7-12, much of Ezekiel, Zechariah, and other passages and sections of the prophets. In the New Testament, there are sections of apocalyptic like Matthew 24. However, there are plenty of other apocryphal apocalyptic works Christians today are less familiar with, like 1-3 Enoch, Apocalypse of Abraham, Adam, Moses, Sedrach, Zephaniah, Zerubbabel, Baruch, Ezra, and more.

The early Christian Jews, however, were very familiar with apocalyptic literature, and it was almost like their language. John appears to have expected the Christians in Asia to understand what he wrote.

Scholars have identified a few traits of apocalyptic literature that set it apart from other literature. Apocalyptic usually has an angel or some otherworldly figure giving a vision to a prophet, or at least includes a dream or vision, and often has distinctive symbolism and imagery. Apocalyptic literature is usually in response to disaster and upheaval showing a pessimistic view of world powers: They are controlled by evil forces. But the righteous have hope through the coming of events. Sometimes this is communicated through a pseudonymous author from an earlier period of history, like Enoch, Abraham, Moses, etc... But pseudonymity does not have to define apocalyptic even if it is common within the genre.

Apocalyptic usually has God through heavenly beings vanquishing powers of evil in both heaven and on earth. A time of great destruction is usually followed by an Edenic peace. And it is usually hidden knowledge previously unknown to human knowledge. This is why it is called apokalypsis or revealing. "Other traits appeared in many but not all of the texts: an array of named angels and demons, an imminent cosmic catastrophe, the resurfacing of ancient mythical content..., and future predictions with a rigid, deterministic timeline." (Lawrence M. Mills, Introduction to the Apocrypha, pg. 173) Revelation, in my opinion, fits most but not all, of these descriptions of apocalyptic literature. For instance, we cannot definitively say Revelation is pseudonymous and much evidence points to the contrary. Revelation hardly has a rigid, deterministic timeline. But Revelation fits enough of the criteria to be considered apocalyptic in its genre.

From what I've read of apocalyptic so far, the most important theme of the genre is that it is a vision or dream. This is the Israelite tradition, that a prophet has a vision or dream from God and conveys it to his audience. This is the core of what makes a book apocalyptic, even if Jewish apocalypse takes on many of these other trends.